'We will work hard to find a few more.'
As blinded as he was by what he saw, Raju Gond, 40, knew exactly what he was looking at.
He and his brother had spent Wednesday morning digging for gold in a 64-square-foot plot of government land in Madhya Pradesh, India, when he saw something in his sieve.
‘My heart pounded for a moment, but I knew immediately that it was a diamond when I kept on wiping the dirt as it kept on shining brightly,’ he said.
The gem will likely fetch about 8million rupees (£74,000) in a government auction, an enormous sum for the labourer who spends his days doing odd jobs to survive.
Sometimes, you’d catch Raju driving a factor for a wealthy farmer. Or working in the fields or diamond mines that make up the gem-rich district of Panna, all amounting to roughly £3 a day.
The pair sped home on their bike to grab their mother to head to the local diamond office to get the diamond evaluated; it was 19.22 carats.
Diamond hunters have descended to Panna, a district sometimes called the ‘diamond bowl of India’, for decades.
‘In 1961, someone found a 54.55-carat diamond, then in 2018 a man from Bundelkhand found a 42-carat diamond worth (£139,000) – and now two brothers have found a precious stone,’ said gold examiner Anupam Singh.
Though, experts say that most of the diamonds there are ‘average’ at best, even a ‘G grade’ diamond can turn a down on their luck person’s life around.
The government’s National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) lets people lease land and shallow mines for a few hundred rupees, or about £8, for a chance to bag a colossal fortune.
Raju had been scavenging for diamonds for 10 years, digging up a mine in Krishna Kalyanpur that his father had taken out a lease two months ago.
The roughly £7.50 it cost the 19-strong family to get the permit seemed like a no-brainer. Being in the middle of the monsoon season, agricultural and masonry work had dried up, leaving them with no income.
Raju has set up a bank account and hopes to use the diamond money to pay off his debt of just over £4,600 – something that, if he worked every single day, would have taken him more than four years to pay off.
Thousands of rural labourers in India are straddled by debt, often after taking out loans for healthcare treatment, education, dowries or day-to-day expenses.
A 2018 report estimated around 8,000,000 people in India were unpaid workers or held in debt bondage, where people are tricked into working for little money to repay a heavy debt.
Raju is now waiting for diamond officials to put his chunky diamond under the hammer. The government takes an 11.% royalty and a tax from whatever it makes, with the rest going to him.
After paying off the debt, Raju says he’ll split the money between his family, which includes his parents, wife, seven children, and the families of his younger brother and sister.
‘Then we will invest in the education of all the children, build houses, buy some land and maybe a tractor,’ he said.
Thinking that luck was on his side, Raju was back out in the mines with his tools yesterday morning hoping to see another diamond in the dirt.
‘We will work hard to find a few more,’ both brothers said.
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